Django 1.4.6 release notes

August 13, 2013

Django 1.4.6 fixes one security issue present in previous Django releases in the 1.4 series, as well as one other bug.

This is the sixth bugfix/security release in the Django 1.4 series.

Mitigated possible XSS attack via user-supplied redirect URLs

Django relies on user input in some cases (e.g. django.contrib.auth.views.login(), django.contrib.comments, and i18n) to redirect the user to an “on success” URL. The security checks for these redirects (namely django.utils.http.is_safe_url()) didn’t check if the scheme is http(s) and as such allowed javascript:... URLs to be entered. If a developer relied on is_safe_url() to provide safe redirect targets and put such a URL into a link, they could suffer from a XSS attack. This bug doesn’t affect Django currently, since we only put this URL into the Location response header and browsers seem to ignore JavaScript there.

Bugfixes

• Fixed an obscure bug with the override_settings() decorator. If you hit an AttributeError: 'Settings' object has no attribute '_original_allowed_hosts' exception, it’s probably fixed (#20636).